Killing Ground

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Noll's grainy portrait, framed together with the lawn scene, shows a stolid, determined-looking thirtyish man with knuckles braced on thighs, ready for action. Behind him sags a wrinkly painted fabric backdrop of crisp white army tents in a pastoral wilderness, a bucolic screen that puts a Boy Scout spin on the brutality of war.

Award-winning photographer John Huddleston gathered Civil War battlefield photographs and then traveled to each site to photograph it as it looks today. The resulting paired photos show erasure. Fields littered with broken bloated bodies, corpse-filled trenches, and carts piled with skulls have become Kmarts, park lawns, and housing developments.

One frame displays two veterans' scarred faces next to the stretch of earth, now rutted by tire tracks, where they fought. Another frame shows shrunken remains of shallowly buried soldiers in Gaines' Mill, Virginia. A bare, sun-bleached tibia and fibula bridge a torn pant leg and tattered boot. The modern-day photo shows a tidy green landscaped house, likely built over fragments of overlooked remains. A third (above) shows a field of fallen soldiers that morphs into a field of football equipment in a weird transmutation of aggression.

The photos speak to a shift in mental landscapes as well as physical ones. The vast agrarian environment of the older photos, over which a mind could apparently roam unchecked, yields to tacky in-your-face visual clutter that noisily eclipses the horizon of the earth and, seemingly, the imagination.